We bury the babies in the poor hole, of course,” said the Reverend Martin Shore, vicar of St. Mary’s, a quaint sandstone church dominated by a sturdy Norman tower that dated all the way back to the early twelfth century. “Poor, wee things. They don’t have much of a life, I’m afraid.”
Sir Henry Lovejoy stood beside the vicar in the midst of St. Mary’s ancient churchyard. The church had been built atop a small hill, and the wind was blowing stiffly, flattening the long grass between the crowded, lichen-covered gray headstones and worn tombs. From here, if he looked to the southeast, Lovejoy could see the tidy fields and expansive farmhouse of Pleasant Farm and, beyond that, the broad, gleaming ribbon of the river Thames.
“Precisely how many infants have you buried from Pleasant Farm?” asked Lovejoy, putting up a hand to grab his hat when a strong gust of wind threatened to carry it away.
The vicar frowned in a way that drew his dimpled chin back against his chest. He was a plump, full-faced man of medium height with pale eyes, fading sandy hair, and wind-chapped fair skin. “Too many, I’m afraid,” he said, letting out a sad sigh. “Far too many.”
“Are the deaths recorded?”
“Oh, yes; of course. But there’s not much to be learned from that, you know. It’s only ‘Baby John’ and ‘Baby Sarah’ and such.”
“Any idea how the little ones die?”
The vicar shrugged. If he’d ever found the steady stream of dead infants coming from Pleasant Farm a source of alarm, it didn’t show. “Not hard to tell, really. Waste away, they do.”
“Do you also bury many dead infants that have been pulled from the Thames?”
“Not here, thankfully, although I understand the villages down on the river get a fair number. Sad, isn’t it? The things people feel driven to do.”
A knifelike shadow fell across the churchyard’s tombstones and, looking up, Lovejoy spotted a hawk soaring overhead. “What can you tell me about Prudence and Joseph Blackadder?”
The question visibly shocked the vicar, as if it had only just occurred to him to wonder why this London magistrate had bothered to travel all the way out to his parish to stand here, in a fierce wind, asking questions about dead babies. “Oh, they’re regular churchgoers, to be sure, to be sure, Sir Henry. Rarely miss a Sunday, they do. Quite the upstanding members of our community, they are.”
“Commendable, no doubt,” said Lovejoy, his lips pressing into a grim line.
So far they had found three women who had worked at Pleasant Farm at various times in the past ten years. All three insisted that they had never observed any irregularities and that Mrs. Blackadder always took care of feeding the infants herself.
“Although they never seemed to eat much,” admitted one of the women, a rather slow-witted, buxom girl named Lily whom Lovejoy interviewed personally. “Slept all the time, they did. Never seen anything like it.”
“Did you ever see anyone give the babies laudanum?”
“Oh, no, sir. Never.”
“How long were you at Pleasant Farm?”
“Three years, sir.”
“And how many babies died during that time?”
“Don’t think I could rightly say, sir. Seemed like they was dying all the time. Never knew one to last more’n a month, to be honest. We was always gettin’ in new ones.”
“Did you ever observe either Mrs. Blackadder or her husband throwing anything into the river?”
The girl looked puzzled. “Like what, yer honor?”
“Something such as, say, a small bundle.”
Lily’s eyes widened. “Oh, no, yer honor.” The girl might be slow-witted, but she was no fool. She knew exactly what Lovejoy was implying, just as she knew that she, too, would be held accountable if the babies’ deaths were proven to be anything other than natural. “Never.”
Lovejoy knew they could keep looking for a previous employee willing to tell them the truth; they could even order an extensive—and expensive—search of the farm’s fields. But he doubted they’d find anything. Not with the Thames so close and handy.
Now, standing on that windblown hillside, surrounded by the timeworn stones of centuries of the dead, Lovejoy found himself at a loss. He could speak to the Home Secretary; force the parishes to remove their infants from Prudence Blackadder’s care and quit sending her any more. But how could they ever hope to hold her accountable for an untold number of murders when they couldn’t prove that even one had occurred?
The simple, inescapable truth was that they could not.
“Was there anything else, Sir Henry?” asked the vicar, casting a furtive glance back at his church.
“I don’t think so, no. Thank you for your time, Father.”
“My pleasure,” said the vicar.
Still holding on to his hat, Lovejoy turned to walk down the hill to his waiting hackney. He walked slowly, buffeted by the wind and weighed down by an inescapable burden of anger and frustration and a deep, abiding sense of failure.